Fast Track is a (nearly) automated formant tracking tool that enables you to extract the formant contours quickly and easily. The tool functions based on a number of praat scripts and as a plug-in in Praat, so there is no need for you to code anything. There is also room for customising the scripts to make more individualised tool. Fast Track is developed by Santiago Barreda at UC Davies and more information can be found here: https://github.com/santiagobarreda/FastTrack

Also, the following paper explains the tool in more detail:

Barreda, S. (2021). Fast Track: fast (nearly) automatic formant-tracking using Praat. Linguistics Vanguard, 7(1), 20200051. https://doi.org/10.1515/lingvan-2020-0051

1 Preliminaries

In the workshop, I will explain and demonstrate the following things:

  1. The fun bit: Bulk formant estimation
  2. Another fun bit: Tidying up data for R
  3. Slightly tedious bit: Extracting vowels

If you would like to follow along, you can install FastTrack beforehand. A detailed step-by-step guide is available in Santiago’s Github repository with some video illustrations. See the wiki on his Github repository for the tutorial on installation (and many other things!)

Prepared data

I have prepared data that are compressed into zip files. Each corresponds to different stages I plan to go through during the demonstration:

Speech data

For demonstration, I’m going to use recordings of the well-known passage “The North Wind and the Sun” that are publicly available in the ALLSTAR Corpus. The ALLSTAR Corpus contains a number of spontaneous and scripted speech that were produced by English speakers from different language backgrounds.

Bradlow, A. R. (n.d.) ALLSSTAR: Archive of L1 and L2 Scripted and Spontaneous Transcripts And Recordings. Retrieved from https://oscaar3.ling.northwestern.edu/ALLSSTARcentral/#!/recordings.

2 Bulk formant estimation

Let’s imagine that you are interested in comparing vowel realisations between a native English speaker and a native Japanese learner of English.

The highlight of using FastTrack is that it enables you to extract formant frequencies from multiple files automatically. So, skipping all the preparation, here are what you can expect from FastTrack:

You can extract formant contours easily through the following steps:

  1. Download NWS_individual_vowels.zip, unfold it and save it somewhere on your computer.

  2. Open Praat and throw a random file in the object window. This will trigger the FastTrack functions to appear in the menu section (if FastTrack is installed properly).

  3. Select Track folder….

  4. Specify the path to the NWS_individual_vowels folder in the “Folder” section. You can also adjust some other functions if prefer. For more details, please consult Sandiego’s Github page.

Setting window for formant estimation (left) and an example of comparison image (right)Setting window for formant estimation (left) and an example of comparison image (right)

Figure 2.1: Setting window for formant estimation (left) and an example of comparison image (right)

This operation yields quite a few output files, for which we don’t have enough time to look through. If interested, you can download “NWS_results.zip” to see the full output. The most important here is the results of the formant estimation, stored in a csv file as aggregate_data.csv in processed_data folder. Here is a glimpse of it:

An example of Aggregate_data.csv

Figure 2.2: An example of Aggregate_data.csv

3 Tidying up data for R

I think FastTrack becomes even more powerful if combined with R. This, however, requires you to figure out how to tidy up the data for a more R-friendly data frame. If interested, you can look at my R code (FastTrack.R) to tidy up the data, which I wrote based on Sam’s script.

Below is my attempt to visualise vowels of nonnative English speakers from the Asian countries (Hong Kong, Thailand and Vietnam) as well as an American English speaker.

Comparison of vowel space in Asian Englishes speakers and an American English speaker

Figure 3.1: Comparison of vowel space in Asian Englishes speakers and an American English speaker

4 Extracting vowels

OK, we have seen that FastTrack is a very powerful tool in automatic formant estimation for a bulk of vowels and then R could also be used to play around with the FastTrack data. However, formant estimation requires each audio file to contain vocalic components throughout the duration, which means that we need to clip out every vowel token from the recording. Thankfully, FastTrack is also ready to do this for us.

If you wish to follow along, the following instructions should work:

  1. Download NWS.zip and save it somewhere on your computer. Again, I have already made the structure optimal for the vowel extraction.

  2. Open Praat and throw a random file in the object window. This will trigger the FastTrack functions to appear in the menu section.

  3. Select Tools…, then Extract vowels with TextGrids.

  4. Specify the following:

Vowel extraction setting window

Figure 4.1: Vowel extraction setting window

5 Other interesting stuff

I have demonstrated the overview of my vowel analysis workflow, but these are only basic things.

  1. Segmenting audio files into phonemes using Montreal Forced Aligner

  2. Formant correction

    • At this stage, my analyses remain very coarse as it still takes me a lot of time checking if the segmenetation is correct before extracting vowels. However, you may want to check the accuracy of formant estimation and hand correct the measurement if necessary. I haven’t managed to learn it just yet, but FastTrack has a capacity for this. You can learn about it in How to analyze a folder and Fixing errors.